Harcourt
Industry: Publishing

Harcourt develops, publishes, and markets exemplary textbooks and related instructional materials for school and home use by students in PreK through sixth grade.

We implemented a document management solution that is used for storing the various book content and managing the content through the approval process. Adobe InDesign and InCopy along with Woodwing SmartConnection is used for the creation and publishing process as well as a seamless integration into a backend Documentum repository.

Business Challenges:

A typical book authoring involves several people ranging from creative department, to technical editors, and subject matter experts. The process is extensive and takes about 12-18 months to publish a book. Harcourt was interested in implementing a solution where content can be reused across the books and would let different parts of the book be in the "under review" process simultaneously - creating a more defined review and approval process to improve the time to market and information accuracy.

Business Benefits:

• Centralized location to store content along with the ability to reuse the content
• Ease of locating the intellectual property (digital assets) across the enterprise
• Improved efficiency and accuracy of the content during the book publishing process
• Easy to use interface and ease of adoption as the workflow and content management is built-in to the familiar publishing environment

Technologies Used:

• Documentum
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe InCopy
• Woodwing SmartConnection
• Custom .NET WebServices

Our role:

We provided the best practices and guidance on usage of a document management system and enhanced the existing system. We also provide ongoing end-user support and enhancements to the existing application and knowledge transfer.